Steam Music Player comes in your ears now it’s finally released

Testing is over and the Steam Music player has landed in today’s client update.

If the Steam client is open, which it always is on any die hard PC gamers machine, then why not listen to some tunes. The music player which is accessed from the top drop-down menu gives you access to game music soundtracks which can be either played for free or purchased.

With the launch of the player Valve has decided to release free soundtrack DLC which includes tracks from Valve titles including Portal 2 and Half Life 2. If you check your Steam client chances are you can also listen to tracks from some of the game already in your library too so it’s worth taking a look if you’ve never messed around with the player before.

As well as the the music player release there are also numerous other fixes which include:

Steam Music Player

The Steam Music Player feature is now available for everyone, making it easy to listen to your music collection while you play games on Steam. For more information, visit Steam News. For product support, visit Steam Support.

General

Added display of friends’ nicknames to notifications

Added support for Family View recovery email address in Big Picture mode

Added “I forgot my PIN” link to Family View unlock dialogs if a recovery email has been set

Simplified the user interface of the main window

Reduced energy usage when running in the background

Fixed installing games using “-applaunch” or “steam://install” commands

Fixed some cases where invalid URL strings would be parsed as URLs in chats

Fixed some issues with Unicode handling inside links in chat

Fixed regression that prevented public sharing of screenshots of non-Steam games

Fixed install from retail disk for games with more than 4 DVDs, to use the data from all disks

Fixed game banners not appearing in grid view while in offline mode

Fixed hang in grid view when hitting enter with no game selected

Fixed warning sound playing when unlocking Family View in desktop mode

Fixed permissions issue preventing developers from uploading Workshop items to an app using the ISteamUGC interface, if they only had an auto-grant license for the app

In-Home Streaming

Improved AMD hardware encoding quality

Updated Streaming audio from Linux to use the default pulse audio sink if none is running at the time streaming starts

Fixed rare crash with windowed game capture

Fixed regression preventing Big Picture mode from responding after streaming a game

Fixed regression preventing streaming to NVIDIA Shield

Windows

Added support for additional caching of proxy auto-discovery results and better background detection of broken networks where auto-discovery fails and takes a long time to timeout

Fixed failing to draw Web views into games that run as the elevated user when Steam wasn’t also elevated

Mac OS X

Updated some common user interface elements for Retina displays

Not a bad week for Steam fans what with the new store launch and curator lists also appearing.Linux